April 18, 2024

Sign up now for the first workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency

I’m excited to announce that registration for the first workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency is now open. The workshop will take place at NYU on Nov 19. It convenes an emerging interdisciplinary community that seeks transparency and oversight of data-driven algorithmic systems through empirical research. Despite the short notice of the workshop’s announcement (about […]

Can Facebook really make ads unblockable?

[This is a joint post with Grant Storey, a Princeton undergraduate who is working with me on a tool to help users understand Facebook’s targeted advertising.] Facebook announced two days ago that it would make its ads indistinguishable from regular posts, and hence impossible to block. But within hours, the developers of Adblock Plus released an […]

The workshop on Data and Algorithmic Transparency

From online advertising to Uber to predictive policing, algorithmic systems powered by personal data affect more and more of our lives. As our society begins to grapple with the consequences of this shift, empirical investigation of these systems has proved vital to understand the potential for discrimination, privacy breaches, and vulnerability to manipulation. This emerging […]

Revealing Algorithmic Rankers

By Julia Stoyanovich (Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Drexel University) and Ellen P. Goodman (Professor, Rutgers Law School) ProPublica’s story on “machine bias” in an algorithm used for sentencing defendants amplified calls to make algorithms more transparent and accountable. It has never been more clear that algorithms are political (Gillespie) and embody contested choices (Crawford), […]

A Peek at A/B Testing in the Wild

[Dillon Reisman was previously an undergraduate at Princeton when he worked on a neat study of the surveillance implications of cookies. Now he’s working with the WebTAP project again in a research + engineering role. — Arvind Narayanan] In 2014, Facebook revealed that they had manipulated users’ news feeds for the sake of a psychology study […]